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doubt, such trains as there might have been running on time. Moreover, and again unlike her sister, she seems to have ruled without the aid of soldiers, policemen, or other regiments of oppression. Why, then, was she so hated? I only ask.)
    Glinda and the Witch of the West are the only two symbols of power in a film which is largely about the powerless, and it’s instructive to “unpack” them. They are both women, and a striking aspect of
The Wizard of Oz
is its lack of a male hero—because for all their brains, heart, and courage, it’s impossible to see the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion as classic Hollywood leading men. The power center of the film is a triangle at whose corners are Dorothy, Glinda, and the Witch. The fourth point, at which the Wizard is thought for most of the film to stand, turns out to be an illusion. The power of men is illusory, the film suggests. The power of women is real.
    Of the two witches, good and bad, can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda? The actress who played her, Billie Burke, the ex-wife of Flo Ziegfeld, sounds every bit as wimpy as her role (she was prone to react to criticism with a trembling lip and a faltering cry of “Oh, you’re
browbeating
me!”). By contrast, Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West seizes hold of the movie from her very first green-faced snarl. Of course Glinda is “good” and the Wicked Witch “bad,” but Glinda is a trilling pain in the neck, while the Wicked Witch is lean and mean. Check out their clothes: frilly pink versus slimline black.
No contest.
Consider their attitudes to their fellow-women: Glinda simpers upon being called beautiful, and denigrates her unbeautiful sisters; whereas the Wicked Witch is in a rage because of her sister’s death, demonstrating, one might say, a commendable sense of solidarity. We may hiss at her, and she may terrify us as children, but at least she doesn’t embarrass us the way Glinda does. True, Glinda exudes a sort of raddled motherly safeness, while the Witch of the West looks, in this scene anyhow, curiously frail and impotent, obliged to mouth empty-sounding threats—
I’ll bide my time. But you just try and keep out of my way
—but just as feminism has sought to rehabilitate old pejorative words such as “hag,” “crone,” “witch,” so the Wicked Witch of the West could be said to represent the more positive of the two images of powerful womanhood on offer here.
    Glinda and the Witch clash most fiercely over the ruby slippers, which Glinda magics off the feet of the late Witch of the East and onto Dorothy’s feet, and which the Wicked Witch of the West is apparently unable to remove. But Glinda’s instructions to Dorothy are oddly enigmatic, even contradictory. She tells Dorothy (1) “Their magic must be very powerful or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” and, later, (2) “Never let those ruby slippers off your feet for a moment or you will be at the mercy of the Wicked Witch of the West.” Statement One implies that Glinda is unclear about the nature of the ruby slippers’ capabilities, whereas Statement Two suggests that she knows all about their protective powers. Nor does either statement hint at the slippers’ later role in helping to get Dorothy back to Kansas. It seems probable that these confusions are hangovers from the long, dissension-riddled scripting process, during which the function of the slippers was the subject of considerable disagreement. But one can also see Glinda’s obliqueness as proof that a good fairy or witch, when she sets out to be of assistance, never gives you everything. Glinda is not so unlike her own description of the Wizard of Oz:
oh, he’s very good, but very mysterious.
    Just follow the Yellow Brick Road,
says Glinda, and bubbles off into the blue hills in the distance, and Dorothy, geometrically influenced, as who would not be after a childhood among triangles, circles, and squares, begins